Skype Is Getting Real-Time Translation Later This Year

There’s no denying that Microsoft’s Skype has played a huge part in international communication, as it’s one of the most popular ways for person A to see and hear person B across the globe.

Of course, person A and person B often speak a different language, which can obviously hamper communication. In order make Skype even more useful, Microsoft says that it will soon have real-time voice and text translation baked right in.

“Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams,” says Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President of Skype and Lync at Microsoft. “In our industry, we often talk about pursuing big, bold dreams, and of how we’re limited only by the power of our imaginations. Skype Translator is one of those endeavors.”

Microsoft demoed the new technology at the inaugural CODE conference in California this week. Check out Pall having a translated conversation with a German colleague via Skype. As you’ll see, Skype’s new translation feature took Pall’s voice and translated it into both German text and German voice, and then did the same for his German colleague’s speech.

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A few hiccups, sure, but overall the translation fostered an understandable conversation. Thought Microsoft says that we are in the early days of this technology, they have given a launch date for the Skype Translator Windows 8 beta app–the end of this year.